Page 55 of Don't Go
I came back from her like I’d been pulled.
I was breathing through my mouth. So was she. Her shirt was half-untucked, and her hair was somewhere it hadn’t been at the start of the evening. My hand was still at her ribs. I took it back.
She looked up at me.
Her eyes were dark and uncertain and not currently with me.
She said, “Stop.”
10.Sabrina
His hands came off me. The cold landed in the same second.
My body was still burning. The air was cold. My hands were still on his chest, where I'd pushed him. I had said stop. Now we were both standing in the alley, breathing through our mouths and trying not to look at each other.
He'd taken half a step back when I'd pushed. He stayed there. His hands were at his sides now. The hand he'd had on the brick over my shoulder had come down.
I let my hands drop from his chest.
I straightened my shirt and tucked back in. I didn't look at him yet.
I steadied my voice. "Beau."
He looked up. "Yeah?"
"This can't — we can't keep doing this."
"Doing what?"
I gestured between us, at the alley, at his mouth, at mine.
"This. I want you. I'm not going to pretend I don't, but I can't have what we are about to have, Beau. I have a kid. The second I let you into it the way you're looking at me right now — I'm going to lose her or myself in you or both. Both is also possible."
He didn't speak.
"There is one version of this I can survive." I steadied my hands on the lapels of my jacket. "No falling in love. No talk of futures. No bringing my daughter into it more than she already is. We sleep together. We don't call it a relationship. You don't call me your girlfriend. I don't meet your friends as anything other than the woman you are seeing casually. And when it is over — and it will be over, Beau, eventually — no questions, no fights. We walk away clean."
I waited. "That is what I can do."
He looked at me for a long beat.
His hands had gone to his sides. His face had gone still. And then — for one second only, because he covered it fast — his face crumpled like he was in pain.
I hadn't expected the hurt to struck where it did.
I'd been hopeful, in the back of my head, that he was going to say yes, that this might actually work, that he would understand, and we'd both know what we were doing and would somehow figure out how to fit it without crushing each other.
It wasn't going to work. He wanted more than I could give him.
"Sabrina, I can't promise you that."
"Cannot promise me which part?" I asked because I wanted to hear him say it.
"The not-falling-in-love part."
I let out a breath. "Then we can't do this."
"Sabrina — "
